Company X Sales Team Hunter Profile Project

Transcription

1 Growth Resources Business Results & Personal Development for CEOs & Executives Company X Sales Team Hunter Profile Project By Clay Garner President, Growth Resources, Inc.

2 Company X Sales Team Hunter Profile Project Situation: Company X had an expanding business based on a new model, reversing the traditional promotion sales approach by creating an attraction model. The company found new business by generating request for quotations for its used equipment via a highly search engine optimized company website. This attraction initiative was producing nearly 2,000 requests a month. The requests were handled by a team of eight sales people. Most of them had been with the company for over eight years. To continue its growth, the company needed to hire new sales reps PLUS help the existing team learn how to maximize its new attraction model. Growth Resources developed a success profile for a sales hunter that worked primarily over the phone with internet-based tools. The entire team was assessed to establish the validity of this profile. The results could then be used to hire new reps and coach individuals already on staff to higher achievement. The results follow below: Sales Present Benefits New Biz Develop Telesales Hunter Success Profile Endurance Answe rs Objecti ons Product Knowledge Commits Time/Effort To Ensure Success Quali fying Initiative Problem Solving Huben Padener Pernam Kohen Quincy Tufana Greg Marner Tuller Jakuby Candidate Guysome

3 Conclusions: This project established that the proposed profile of 10 critical sales skills would work moderately well to predict the future sales potential of candidates for its attraction model sales people. The overall profile results chart, makes it clear that Company X has a productive group of sales people who have combined inner drive with several key sales skills to forge individual success. In fact, the sales skills fall into three categories of impact when predicting future performance: Major Impact: Presenting Benefits Endurance Qualifying Secondary Impact: Answering Objections Product Knowledge Initiative Problem-Solving Negotiating Skills Tertiary Impact: New Business Development Commits Time & Effort To Ensure Success As a result, for example, should two candidates be evaluated for a new position, the person scoring best on the primary impact skills would have the edge for the job. In general, the average overall scores for each established sales person match up with Management s rating of their potential. The two primary exceptions to this conclusion Tufana and Greg produce at top levels despite their overall scores falling in the average range. While various factors could explain this result, this would not negate the recommendation that new hire candidates with an overall potential of less that 50.0 would not likely produce sales results equal to the rest of the group. Individual Feedback: The individual feedback sessions with each participant went very well. The staff was open and expressed gratitude for the feedback. With only one exception, the general consensus was that the reports were at least 90-95% accurate in describing the true skills and motivations of each individual. The one exception had been through what he considered a similar assessment process in the past. This familiarity made it difficult for him to not attempt to out think the Chally assessment. During the feedback session, each participant was given three or four recommendations to consider and potentially act upon to either leverage up their current success or moderate the effects of a limitation, as follows:

4 Huben: Explore your defensiveness, looking for ways to remain open for personal development Leverage your presentation skills Utilize your skills at answering objections to increase your negotiating skills performance Padener: Ask for sales management reviews and feedback on your work Celebrate your successes Mine your relationships for repeat business Leverage your presentation skills Pernam: Potentially move into new sales areas to utilize skills When working with others and in confrontational situations, learn to mind the gap... put some space and consideration between stimulus and response Make it a practice to seek to be understand rather than be understood particularly as it relates to problem-solving Kohen: Take a deep look into your perfectionism, looking for areas where it may hold back your progress Leverage your emphasis on the quality of the customer experience Utilize your skills at answering objections to increase your negotiating skills performance Develop a personal sales plan and goals and let this drive you Quincy: Make it a practice to seek to be understand rather than be understood particularly as it relates to answering objections Before answering objections, check what you have heard let me feedback to you what I think you said. Develop a personal plan for sales success to follow each day towards quarterly/yearly goals Tufana: Focus the majority of your time on relationship building With prospects, do not assume that they understand your benefits as your repeat customer do so Weed out non-qualified prospects quickly not everyone needs to be a buyer or an ongoing relationship Continue to work on the stresses in your life

5 Greg: Develop some tools for dealing with the stresses in your love Weed out non-qualified prospects quickly not everyone needs to be a buyer or an ongoing relationship Focus the majority of your time on relationship building Begin to position yourself as a teacher for the other reps leverage your experience Jakuby: Remember that it takes the same amount of effort to sell a smaller-sized order/opportunity as it does a larger one and move on to larger sales Practice presenting benefits, use key questions to propel your presentation forward Make it a practice to seek to be understand rather than be understood particularly as it relates to answering objections Use you initiative/planning orientation to plan a path to where you want to go with higher sales opportunities Recommendations: In addition to using the new telesales hunter profile for the selection of incoming new sales reps, three other activities could be helpful in raising the level of sales performance: an individual sales coaching process, group development in the areas of qualifying and presenting benefits, and the creation of a best practices manual in the areas of answering objections and problem-solving. Individual Sales Coaching Process: With this recommendations, consider the concept of process versus program. A coaching process would involve a commitment to providing current sales reps with sales management like coaching, occurring over a time period with specific goals in mind. We recommend a process that would involve the following with each rep: Agreement on 1-2 key personal challenges areas as revealed by their Chally/Growth Resources Profile Report Definition on actions and measures to address the challenge areas Tracking/inspecting progress of the efforts above Sharing results of efforts with the rest of the sales group This process would start with a 1-2 hour initial session to agree to the challenges, actions, and measures. Then, a 1-hour follow-up feedback and results session would occur every second month for four sessions. Providing that results were being achieved, the feedback sessions would then become quarterly as well as begin to incorporate other strategies and tactics of the business.

6 Qualifying/Presenting Benefits Development: According to our project, these two skills (along with Endurance) have the most significant impact on sales performance at Company X. As a result, increasing capability in these skills can have a further positive impact on current performance. Consider creating a custom designed program, utilizing some outside sales training materials along with content defined by the group itself. In both skills, focus development on targeted best customers by product categories. This could create a series of qualifying questions that would then channel prospects into specific tracks for targeted benefit presentations. Training implementation could then occur over time in short meetings. These would include content discussion and refinement as well as role-playing exercises Answering Objections/Problem Solving Best Practices Manual: This effort would be to collect all the current wisdom of the group into a best practices manual for use in training new reps. As an added benefit, the very act of collecting the group s top sales objections and their best answers would also serve to reinforce current sales success and behavior. The process would be simple and could be accomplished internally. A series of short one-hour group meetings would be held to brainstorm the content. This information would then be collected into a document. This document would then be reviewed by each participant. The final edited version would then be available for new hire training. If you have any questions about this article or you would like information on Chally Assessments with its database of over 400,000 sales rep assessments from over 2,000 companies and 100,000 customer interviews for selection and coaching, contact Clay Garner. Clay is the president of Growth Resources, Inc. and is a Chally Affiliate in the Chicagoland area. He can be reached at or cgarner@growthresource.com.